Episode 151: Mary Lou at 94
The Broad Experience
The Broad Experience
5.0 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode we meet a true broad - a 20th century woman who has bucked convention in more ways than one.
Mary Lou landed her first job as a telephone operator in 1941, and went on to become a social worker and then a teacher. Along the way she married, had six children, divorced, and became a (very) independent woman. Today, at almost 95, she’s settled down with her partner Al and tells me, ‘I’ve had a fantastic life.’
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Better Help Online Therapy bought this 30 second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw. |
| 0:10.8 | Relax your shoulders. Take a deep breath in and out. |
| 0:20.3 | Feels better, right? |
| 0:21.9 | That's 15 seconds of self-care. |
| 0:24.9 | Imagine what you could do with more. |
| 0:27.4 | Visit betterhelp.com forward slash random pod |
| 0:30.5 | for 10% off your first month of therapy. |
| 0:33.8 | No pressure. |
| 0:35.0 | Just help. |
| 0:35.9 | But for now, just relax. |
| 0:37.8 | Welcome to the broad experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I'm Ashley Milntite. |
| 0:56.1 | This time, a 20th century woman looks back on a rich and complicated life. So what did it feel like |
| 1:04.4 | to be out on your own and totally supporting yourself? Liberating. Liberating. |
| 1:11.6 | And I had the teaching job and I loved it. |
| 1:14.5 | And I loved it every day more and I never expected to. |
| 1:18.6 | But she began her first job as a teenager in 1941. |
| 1:23.6 | Decades of experience coming up. |
| 1:35.3 | Music Decades of experience coming up. Mary Lou is 94 years old. She's an old friend of my husband's family. And when I talked to her about her life several months ago, she and her partner were |
| 1:44.8 | staying with us for the weekend. She didn't want to use her last name in the podcast. I've said |
| 1:51.2 | this before, but I love talking to older women, actually anyone older. But for the purposes of this show, |
| 1:57.6 | I've always wanted to get more perspectives from women in their 80s and 90s. |
| 2:02.8 | Mary Lou was born in 1925, into a middle-class family on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. |
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